Kevin Sumlin, Brent Pease are 'one-back clinic' alumni

Kevin Sumlin will lead Texas A&M in its first SEC conference game Saturday against Florida. (The Birmingham News/Linda Stelter)

Texas A&M head coach Kevin Sumlin is very familiar with Florida offensive coordinator Brent Pease. They went to the same school.

Not the same college. The same football school.

"There used to be a thing -- it's not secret -- called the one-back clinic," said Sumlin, whose Aggies open SEC play with a home game against Pease's Gators on Saturday. "It was a bunch of coaches who were in one-back or no-back type of offenses. I think the first time I met Brent was at one that Mike Price hosted at Washington State. Brent was at Montana and Mike Leach was there, Noel Mazzone, Mike Price, Gary Crowton ... a bunch of guys who threw the football around -- probably in the mid- to early 90s I would say."

Sumlin, who served as an offensive assistant at Wyoming and Minnesota during the early to mid-90s, kept in touch with Pease as their careers progressed. While Sumlin left Houston to take the Texas A&M job this year, Florida coach Will Muschamp hired Pease away from Boise State to replace Charlie Weis.

"He's a guy that I have a tremendous amount of respect for and I know there's a reason why he was a highly sought-after coordinator last year," Sumlin said of Pease. "He's a guy that I think does an excellent job, makes you defend the whole field, makes you be gap-conscious, hides a lot of things with shifts and motions, unbalance, gives you all the looks but will also do all that with window dressing and give you power football, throw play-action and double moves and things like that. He's had a good career. His career's only going to get better and he's also going to be an excellent head coach one day."

Pease's offense got off to a slow start last Saturday against Bowling Green, with the running of Mike Gillislee (148 yards, two TDs) providing the only bright spot until Jeff Driskel found Frankie Hammond with a 50-yard touchdown pass early in the fourth quarter to help the Gators salt away a 27-14 win.

Driskel, who earned the starting quarterback job in the win, and Jacoby Brissett combined to throw for just 145 yards. But Muschamp said he and the Gators accomplished what they wanted to get done against the Falcons.

"There's some things obviously we need to tie up and do a little better," Muschamp said. "The mission was accomplished as far as we were concerned in winning the game, No. 1. But No. 2, the way we did it: We needed to run the ball. We needed to run the ball when they knew we were going to run it. In some situations I thought we were very good at that; in some, we weren't. In short yardage, we need to do a better job.

"I got what I wanted out of that game from a temperament standpoint offensively and how we wanted to approach the game. We obviously will branch out a little bit as we continue to work through the season."